


Spook

by macabre



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Not Related, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-11
Updated: 2009-07-11
Packaged: 2017-11-08 12:36:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/443256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/macabre/pseuds/macabre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU (boys not related) - Sam and Dean are both outcasts in their little Midwestern town.  Dean for his public outing and Sam for his alleged mental instability. When Dean finally gives Sam a chance, he finds an unusual boy with a link to ghosts. Together, they investigate a haunted house.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spook

The kid is nuts. Should be institutionalized. Dean doesn’t know why he’s there, sitting in the guy’s shithole apartment. He really needs to learn to say no to pretty boys. Especially when the crazies are always the ones that show an interest. Therefore, Dean should have automatically assumed the guy was a nutjob when he sat next to him in the park. At three AM. Should have turned on some warning bells.

“And it’s not very happy.”

The kid’s name is Sam, and he’s got legs to high heaven and a killer (quite actually, a creepy) smile. His eyes have that dark, half-insane look always, and now the kid is telling him about a ghost.

“How do you know?” Dean asks, just to amuse him.

“I’m Haley Joel Osment,” Sam says, and like everything he says, he sounds quite serious. “I’ve got the sixth sense.”

“You see dead people?” Really, one more thing and Dean is going to leave.

“Naw, I can’t see them any more than any ordinary psychic,” Sam answers, his eyes roaming around his own blank, water stained walls. “But I can feel them. And I can feel what they feel.”

Was this kid serious? Still…it wasn’t like Dean had anywhere better to be.

“Oh,” Dean says lamely. He’s sitting with a psycho; it’s not like he needs to be a great conversationalist. “How long have you lived here?”

Sam grins (still creepy) as if he knows what Dean is thinking. “Two years.”

The apartment is really just one bedroom rented out in some old lady’s basement. The lady must be crazier than Sam to let him live there. The floor is wood, but it’s old, stained, and threatening to crack open. The walls are an ugly off white/beige with water stains and miscellaneous multicolored markings. Dean thinks there might be blood on one wall. The room only has one overhead light, and Sam hasn’t put any other lamp in, so it’s too dim to do much. In fact, Sam hasn’t put anything in the room to make it livable – there’s a bare mattress on the dirty floor and a stack of paperbacks next to it, but that’s basically it.

“This room is as creepy as…” Dean thinks out loud accidently.

“Me?” Sam grins, and in the low light he looks slightly satanic.

“Seriously, it’s like you fell out of an episode of _the X-Files_ as the creepy guest star.” Dean is starting to avoid eye contact now too. Sam is finally looking at him from under his thick-rimmed glasses.

There’s definitely a long moment of awkward silence.

“So, you wanna go?”

“Go where?” It’s only 5:30 AM. No place is open yet.

“To the house.”

The Curtis house is a classic abandoned make-out spot for teenagers to visit on weekends. That is, if they’re brave enough. Cliché stories of floating objects and an insistent ghostly voice surround it, and supposedly a girl was critically injured a few years back after entering.

Dean at first hopes Sam isn’t asking him there to make-out, but in the normal streetlamp light Dean can appreciate again just how fine looking Sam is. Dean is disappointed to think then that Sam has no intention of making any move on Dean, because surely he could have done that in his room.

So Sam might be leading him there to ambush and kill him. Dean is not entirely worried; even though physically Sam is nearly two of him across and a head taller, he doesn’t look coordinated enough to hurt a newborn.

And yeah, in the right light, Sam’s smile isn’t so satanic. It’s almost sweet. Or sweet looking in Dean’s own fucked up mind.

“Not too many people talk to me.” Sam just has to say the most obvious and painful thing while they walk to the house. “Why are you with me?”

“I don’t know.” Isn’t that the absolute truth. Dean has seen the kid around, heard a new rumors about him, but really Sam is an enigma. Although, Dean has to admit that Sam is about as weird as people think he is, but he’s also proven to be completely harmless. Thus far.

“Is it because you’re lonely too?” Sam asks this without any shame, like accusing someone of being a lonely, depressed loser is completely socially acceptable.

“I’m not…” But he is. And Sam knows it. Can understand it.

“Or maybe it’s because you find me sexually appealing,” Sam suggests nonchalantly.

Dean coughs inconspicuously. “Sexually appealing? Couldn’t you just say attractive? Could you be a bigger-“

“Freak?” Sam suggests. “My mother used to ask the same thing. Every day.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” Dean apologizes. He really does feel bad; how many times has Sam been called a freak? The guy isn’t that bad. Still, he doesn’t need Sam asking him questions about whether he finds him ‘sexually appealing.’ Christ.

Sam is smiling dazedly, stepping a little closer to Dean. Dean gulps. The proximity runs a current under his skin and the jolt leaves an itch behind.

“It’s a small town, and even I hear the gossip,” Sam taunts him. Or, tries to taunt him. His voice still sounds thin and serious.

“Meaning what?”

“I know you’re gay,” Sam says, still smiling. “Don’t worry, I am the last person who cares.”

It may be coming from the kid’s opinion that matters least, but it still comforts Dean to hear someone verbally accept him. Perhaps the reason why Dean followed Sam home earlier was because he knew that Sam wouldn’t judge him, and yes, he was lonely. Dean’s been lonely since he was publically outed his senior year of high school, caught making out with the quarterback after practice. It wasn’t even an original way to go.

“I should have left this town a long time ago,” Dean sighs.

“Because you think no one understands you,” Sam supplies, hand brushing against his. “But I do.”

“Why, did your parents kick you out when you were still in high school because you were gay?” Dean really can’t help letting the bitter seep into his voice, despite the years put between him and the incident, the isolation since then. He lives barely fifteen minutes from his parents’ house, and yet he hasn’t seen them except for glimpses in these past years.

“Nope, I came home from high school one day to find my dad overdosed in my own bed, and my mother kicked me out because I sat next to him on the bed for hours. I didn’t call the cops or her.”

“She kicked you out because you were in shock?”

“She wanted to kick me out long before that, but my dad wouldn’t let her,” Sam says, slowing to a stop in front of an old house. “We’re here.”

Dean wants to ask Sam so much more, like why his mother always wanted to kick him out, or why his father killed himself, or if he’s always felt lonely, and how exactly he got to be the way he is (even if he doubts Sam could answer that one), but he’s right, they’ve arrived at the Curtis house. The house itself looks like it was plucked right out of a Hammer horror, but Dean has always found it romantic in a haunting way.

“Shall we?” Sam asks, easily jumping over the low fence in front, even though there are completely broken down areas he could have stepped through.

“Have you been here before?” Dean asks, following Sam up the pathway to the front door without hesitation. Sam looks too comfortable in the surroundings.

“Yes, of course. I come here quite often. No one usually bothers me here.”

“Except for horny teenagers,” Dean adds.

“No one,” Sam says, pushing open a creaking door that was ajar in the first place. “No one has come here since that girl nearly died.”

“Yeah, you probably scared her to death by lurking around.”

Sam makes a face at him, but Dean can hardly see it. The sun is going to rise soon, but the world is still a deep navy.

“That happened over a year before I moved here,” he says, pausing in the doorway. “I lived in Jefferson before here.”

“Didn’t make it too far from your mother, huh?”

Sam shrugs.

“Do you see her ever?”

“Not since my father died.”

Silence hangs in the air between them, and Dean is able to process the fact that he’s standing in a supposedly haunted house with a kid who’s still nearly a stranger and, according to the town, is a little off balance. An attractive stranger, but a stranger none the least.

“Did you bring a flashlight or anything?” Dean asks, struggling to see Sam as he walks further into the house. The floorboards creak underneath their feet, giving them both a general sense of where the other is, but Dean is waiting to knock into something.

“No. She’ll be happier if we don’t disturb her with any light,” Sam says.

Oh yeah. Dean forgot Sam personally knows how the ghost feels.

“Here.” Dean hears Sam’s suggestion, but he’s not sure what he’s being offered until he feels cool, long fingers slipping between his.

Holding hands with Sam in the dark makes Dean feel like a kid all over again; awkward, confused, but longing. Weirdly enough, the word _wrong_ doesn’t cross Dean’s mind once.

“Stay close to me,” Sam commands, and by the puff of air on his lips, Dean knows he’s facing him for the moment until there’s a pull at his hand and he’s being led up creaking stairs.

In his acute awareness in the dark, Dean knows Sam is leading his past several doors on the top floor, but he keeps pulling Dean along until they hit the very last room.

“The master room,” Sam explains, pushing open the door and leading into a large, dark space, vague details starting to show in the nearly morning glow creeping through the windows on the opposite side of the room.

“Uh, isn’t this the one room we shouldn’t be in?” Dean asks, a little nervously. He can feel Sam pause next to him. “I mean, if this place is haunted and all that, I doubt your lady friend wants us in her room.”

Sam drops his hand and walks a few steps further into the center of the room, then flops down restlessly on the floor. Dean can feel the thick covering of dust floating about.

“This wasn’t her room,” Sam says quietly. “It was her parents.”

“She tell you that, Sam?”

“I told you I can’t communicate with her,” Sam says patiently. “I just feel her. I feel that she doesn’t ever come in this room.”

Dean should leave. He should go. He should turn around and fumble his way back out into the dying night.

Or he can stay and be reborn in the light. With Sam.

Dean doesn’t need all of Sam’s fucked-up shit on top of his own. People in the town are pretty cold to him already, but if they’re cold to Dean, then they treat Sam as a leper they tried to put out of his misery long ago that just keeps coming back. Mothers tell their children to stay away from Sam. Any group of men together that sees Sam taunts him, occasionally throwing punches as well. The old folks scream at him to stay away from their property. Even the oddballs like Dean stay their distance from him.

And for what? Dean’s heard all the rumors, but now, standing in Sam’s presence, he can hardly recall the reasons no one will talk to him. Why he never talked to him. Sam was mentally instable, some even claiming he escaped from a mental hospital. Well, Dean supposes that if Sam goes around claiming he sees ghosts, he might deserve a healthy dose of weird, but not unstable. Dean might have even heard that people suspected Sam of killing his parents. Maybe his own mother started that own.

Sam was hardly seen in public.

Sam was never seen during the day.

Sam was a mute. Never talks to anyone.

Sam ate dead fetuses for breakfast.

Okay, so Dean never heard anyone spread that rumor, but he wouldn’t be surprised if someone out there believed it. Basically, Sam is bad news for anyone who wanted to have an ordinary social life. Thing is, Dean is already an outcast as well. Not an unstable, mute, baby-eating outcast, but a queer and a loner. It all equates to an average of the same in this town.

So because Dean has absolutely nothing to lose, for the second time that day, he sits next to Sam, cross-legged and close. Sam is barely propped up on his elbows, so low to the floor that his head is nearly in Dean’s lap.

“So what now?” Dean asks, daring to skim his hand through Sam’s shaggy hair. Sam doesn’t seem surprised by the contact; he leans into, and Dean is barely able to see in the light a grin on his lips.

“Now we watch the sunrise and celebrate with someone who hates her parents as much as we do.”

As the sun rises, Sam teaches Dean to be perfectly still, stuck in one moment of time, and in this frame of timelessness, Dean can feel something. He can feel Sam’s longing but serenity within himself, even if he can’t feel the extra presence in the house. Sam is calm, and next to him, Dean realizes he’s been floundering for years, never happy, always restless.

“You’re happy, aren’t you?” Dean doesn’t ask this in so much of an inquisitive tone, but more as a declaration that he understands.

“Of course I’m happy,” Sam responds, sounding generally baffled. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Dean could list all of the reasons that people stay away from him, but instead he doesn’t say a thing. Sam’s face softens in the silence and young light, a new and different dawning.

“I’m not alone,” is what he says. Dean’s not sure if he’s talking about the ghosts or him. It doesn’t matter.

It is a couple hours later when they leave, still early, but morning enough that families have emerged and are congregated in the park or around the church. As they walk through town, hand in hand, people gawk. They stop mid-conversation to look at the two men, in broad daylight, together and smiling. Sam is walking but looking upward toward the sky, and Dean has his head resting against Sam’s shoulder.

Dean practically moves into Sam’s shitty room with him, the two of them taking up the entire space. They briefly consider repainting the room and getting at least a bookshelf for all of Sam’s paperbacks. They never do. Instead they fill their time rolling around from the mattress to the floor. Dean discovers all the voices Sam can do when he reads to him, all so different from his usual dry tone. Sam discovers how many push-ups and crunches Dean does every night. As happy as Dean is with Sam, the hole in his heart left by his parents slowly filling up, they both decide they can’t live there forever, and Dean’s place isn’t much better. So they make plans.

Dean is ready to leave this town with Sam. Sam thinks they should move into the Curtis house.

 


End file.
